It took a whole year, but Google is finally adding the facial recognition features you can find in Picasa Web albums to its desktop app. With today’s release of Picasa 3.5, when you add a name tag, it scans your entire photo library and applies that name to every match. If it’s not sure it’s the same face, it gives you the option to apply the tag.
To help you tag people, Picasa auto-completes names from your Google contacts when you start typing a name. And you can also geo-tag a photo by marking a photo on Google Maps.
Once faces are tagged, you can create a face collage of the same person, time-lapse movies, or sync the tags with your Picasa Web albums. You can now upload directly from your camera to Picasa Web albums if you like. Also, with this release the Mac version is no longer in beta.
Facial recognition is now a standard feature for photo apps, both desktop and online. iPhoto has it, Faceboopk Photos has it (through Face.com), and now both Picasa’s online and desktop versions have it.
Here’s a video with a demo of the new features:
Still no CMYK support ?
Support it & Picasa will be my default photo viewer app !
Where is my flickr face recognition? Darn it!
Nifty! Well, except for the Face Collage. That seems only useful if you’re into building creepy stalker shrines.
That is awesome, loved it
http://www.onlyjust.net
Going to help->check for updates online, doesn’t currently work. Wonder why.
If this worked in conjunction with the Picasa Facebook Uploader, it would be &^%$# epically awesome. However, I doubt it. Hopefully the FB Uploader developers look into this.
Very nice feature, this is the first time I have seen facial recognition in a desktop application.
WL Photo Gallery desktop App already have this feature since last year release.
Yeah, and WL Photo Gallery has a plug-in to upload it directly to Facebook, including the face tags.
Soon Google will have information about everyone in the world, they know who you are, where you live, how you think, what you are doing, all your friends and relatives. Better than FBI. What a nice world.
Am I the only one troubled by this?
So, let met get this straight. Now facial recognition to your photos, why would you really NEED that, when you can apply a global macro? Why the need for facial recognition?
So now google, can, with Google Voice, keep track of all your telephone data and transcribe it automatically to make it searchable, and also identify who is calling you. how long before they itegrate that into the facial recognition software and make that searchable too.
Oh and don’t forget Google’s new lucractive Government contracts.
Gimmeabreak! Do no evil or EVIL INCARNATE
I miss the old days when all we had to worry about was Microsoft packaging things together.
Soon all our freedoms and anonymity will dissolve before our eyes.
In B4 Ip.address arguement.
nice tech, but a pity it tries to update my search engine settings (for a browser I barely use, too)
@Victor why would YOU need pictures anyway
It’s just a more convenient way to find things, like “oh and this is the picture of my family making snowmen” or something
Wait … are you complaining that you can now do something on your computer rather than having to do it on Google’s servers, thus lowering the access they have to the data?
Excellent. I’ve been waiting a while for this feature which just pushes Picasa further ahead of every other free solution out there.
That’s great, but what I really want is an app that’ll have a shared meta-data db. It’s not useful to me to have my db on one workstation while we use two or three computers to browse the photo collection.
The applications of machine learning are finally starting to percolate into daily life. Pretty amazing to see. A wave of other recent announcements are related – http://bit.ly/vYfam.
see my post about mashing facial recognition with facebook http://blog.car...tion-works.html
None of these features matter, though, because you STILL can’t choose a professional black background for your page. Get with it, Google!